I think Mazex explained everything nicely.
I haven't done a huge amount of shooting, but i did serve a year as a conscript in the local air force (we have a mixed armed force, with the bulk being reservist troops, civilians who get into armed duty for some months, and the rest being professional soldiers of varying ranks).
When we practice fired our personal armament (G3s and LMGs) we didn't use tracers.
However, as i was trained to be a flak gunner i also had the chance to fire some 20mm rounds from a dual-barrel Rheinmetall gun.
In that case, the effect was very similar to what Mazex said. The curved rail effect was not so easy to observe because the gun barrels were lifted about 60-70 degrees up in the sky, but the rest is pretty close. The moment i pressed the trigger and the tracer left the barrel, i saw a short streak of thin, yellow light. What surprised me was that the tracer look longer when it was close to me, but seemed to reduce in size within milliseconds, as it raced away. By the time it was past it's half-way point it was almost a dot, then came small puffs of smoke and after a couple of seconds you could hear the explosions.
Now that i think of it, the only simulator to ever have that sound feature was B-17 the mighty 8th, in almost any other sim i've seen it seems that sound travels with the same speed as light.
It would be very cool to have that corrected in CoD as well, so that when an explosion is far away we first see it but hear it a few seconds later.
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